


Everything (You Could Think Of)

by Greenninjagal



Category: Zeroes Series - Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Ethan is inside out, F/F, F/M, Found Family, It picks up a week after Nexus ends, Totally open ended, i wrote this a while ago and forgot about it, sorry - Freeform, warning: spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-05
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 03:54:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15900372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greenninjagal/pseuds/Greenninjagal
Summary: “I’m going to call your friends,” she said. “I’m going to get you help.”He knew she was going to call the rest of the Cambria Five and tell them what was going on. What had happened to him after Mardi Gras and why they hadn’t heard from him since. She would explain to them that he needed help and that they were his friends and she would pull all the stops she could to get him help from them. He knew everything.His head pulsed again and he thought that if they didn’t figure out something soon, he’d die from his own power.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I started writing this a while ago, like long long while ago. And It reached nineteen pages before I realized that I had to a) return the book and b) start packing for college. Somewhere in the mess, my notes got lost and I didn't open the file again until tonight. So it now has an open ending. Hopefully you'll like it anyway.

Ethan had filled two spiral bound notebooks, three coffee shop napkins, and the entire pad of paper that the Hotel had supplied with the room, before he ran out of writing utensils. He threw the dead pen on the table and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.   
  
He didn’t know what time it was other than late o’clock. He didn’t even know what day it was really. Or how long he had been doing this. What he did know was everything else.   
  
And that Everything Else was bursting in his head, thumping with everything part of his heart beat. An angry sound, a frustration, and so many words and things he felt that he had no control over it.   
  
Bellwether-- Nate-- Glorious Leader of the Cambria Five had once thought that the inverse of Ethan’s power had been to draw the truths from people the way Verity did. Ethan knew now that was very super wrong: this was the inverse of his power.   
  
He wasn’t a Scam anymore. He was truly all-knowing about everyone and everything and all their futures but he couldn’t speak a word of it. Which was such a dick move for the universe to make that Ethan wasn’t even surprised.   
  
Of course this had happened. Of course it had happened to him.

  
He nearly jumped at the hand on his shoulder. It was light and airy, there but not there. A reminder that he didn’t need because he had been very well aware that Sonia had been rolled over on the bed just behind him snoring softly.   
  
Now she had crawled herself over his side of the bed, and leaned over his shoulder gently. She smelled like vanilla soap, the hotel’s complementary body wash.   
  
“Hey,” She whispered. Her eyes were trained on the paper in front of him: the margins of the phone book that had been sitting in the desk. She had just woken up, again, something she had been doing all night on and off. Waking up just to find him still sitting in the same chair with the same frustrated expression. “Are those lottery numbers?”   
  
Ethan sighed out a breath and nodded. He pointed at a name next to them, the lucky man who was going to win everything and then spend it all on useless junk and collectables that will have no value in a few years.   
  
Sonia frowned, “If you know the numbers why don’t we just go by the ticket? We could win.” She smiled and looped her arms around his next and rested her chin on his shoulder, “We could be millionaires.”   
  
He wasn’t going to lie; he liked the way she said “we”. It made his chest feel all warm and his heart melted to putty in her hands. Her voice was a melody he couldn’t get out of his head even if he wanted to (but really he didn’t). She kept him grounded with her words; kept him from losing himself in the noise of all the knowledge of the world.   
  
He didn’t have the pen or the paper to explain why they couldn’t buy the ticket. So instead Ethan Thomas Cooper leaned back in her embrace and soaked it in.   
  
“You should come back to bed,” she said after a moment. Her voice was quiet and soft but her tone was pleading. Ethan opened his eyes and stared at the blank wall ahead of them. She wasn’t a Bellwether manipulating him to do what she wanted, but he felt like he should anyway; he didn’t want to upset her, or disappoint her, or make her frustrated-- because he knew she was beginning to reach all of those things. He wanted to go back to bed, to lay right next to her and listen to her breathing until they both sunk into another reality.

  
As if on cue the entire world burned a bright blinding white. His vision went sideways as knew information exploded all around him burning his senses and his thoughts in the process. Pain caressed his skull.

  
Somewhere a woman by the name of Alex Jackson was twisting her wedding ring wondering if she was sure getting married was the best idea. Somewhere a Maurice Delcross was betting his life savings at a casino where he would win once and lose the rest of night. Somewhere Bethany Whitehold stopped believing in the Tooth fairy when she saw her dad stumbled into the room thinking she was asleep and slip a two dollar bill under her pillow.

  
Somewhere Ethan Thomas Cooper had gone rigid in his seat all his muscles clenched and tension drew him tighter than a bow string. Sonia Sonic felt it in the way she was leaning on him and she drew back in a second, wide awake and slipping off the bed. She padded around the chair, swiping a dozen dried up sparkly gel pens and markers off the desk in the process, until she was right in his line of sight-- assuming he was still seeing the white walls of her hotel room and not the view from Martin Collins as he and his girlfriend stared up at the stars.

 

“Ethan.” She sounded far away and underwater. Lost in the chaos of his mind. “Ethan, come back to me.”

 

She was a voice in a million thousand voices that were all screaming his name. She wasn’t screaming. She was soft, patient, a little scared that this would be the time he didn’t come back and she wouldn’t be able to help him.

 

She placed her hands on either side of his face. They were cold from the chill of the air conditioner in the room, but they were still warmer than his skin. She thought he was icy to the touch. Ethan gasped and reeled at the contact.

 

“Ethan Thomas Cooper,” She said. “Come back to me.”

 

Like it was that easy to follow that voice through the yelling in his head-- the yelling of people fighting over truths that had been expelled by Verity a week ago, the yelling of people facing the clarity gifted by Oliver, the yelling of people trying to circumnavigate the tremendous love of humankind that Kelsie had flooded them all in. Like it was that easy to pick her out from everyone else.

 

Ethan inhaled like he had been drowning. His entire body shivered with the knowledge, shaking as he tried to clamp it all down. He stared at Sonia, forcing himself to take deeper breaths, forcing himself to calm down and relax under her touch.

 

She was as pale as a ghost.

 

He reached up and grabbed her hands just to give himself something to hold on to-- a grounding point, an anchor. He was here in this moment with her right by his side.

 

She stared at him, “Oh my god, Ethan.” 

 

He tried to remember what a worried expression looked like on his face-- what he looked like in general. His brain pulsed. He let go of her hand and reached shakily for his pen even though he knew it was dead and inkless. 

 

The only way to stop them-- the explosions of information-- was to write down as much of what he was experiencing as he could. Just to get it out of his head to make room for the rest that was flooding in. If he stopped surely it would drown him. He’d lose himself in the same information that was meant to help the new world blossom into something better than the old one.

 

“Pens are free at the front desk,” Sonia blew out a breath. She wiped her cheek callously, and turned towards the door. Even though she was in just a T-shirt and old gym shorts, Ethan thought she looked amazing, that she was too amazing, that he was so far below her level that he wasn’t sure what made her fall in love with him at all.

 

Ethan whimpered weakly feeling pathetic, feeling awful because he was making her go get him pens just so he could think three words in a row. 

 

She stopped at the TV stand, hand out over one of the two hotel key cards that they had. She glanced back at him, a curl of her magenta hair falling over her eyes, “Use my computer.”

 

He followed her gaze back to her laptop which she put in sleep mode hours ago when she had first started falling asleep. It was glowing warm with a barely noticeable light. She treasured her laptop just like her phone.

 

He couldn’t take that away from her. So he shook his head, and twisted a dead pen in his hand. Sonia frowned.

 

She took the bare minimum time sprinting down the stairs rather than wait for the elevator-- she talked to the girl at the front desk, a gave the wonderful Sonia Sonic confident smile and returned with eight pens all decorated with the Hotel’s logo.

 

She kissed him on the cheek, running a hand through the blonde of his hair that was quickly fading now that he wasn’t on the run anymore. “I’m going to call your friends,” she said. “I’m going to get you help.”

 

He knew she was going to call the rest of the Cambria Five and tell them what was going on. What had happened to him after Mardi Gras and why they hadn’t heard from him since. She would explain to them that he needed help and that they were his friends and she would pull all the stops she could to get him help from them. He knew everything.

His head pulsed again and he thought that if they didn’t figure out something soon, he’d die from his own power.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A call for help is answered.

Ethan had expected them to be mad at him. He couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t angry with him-- except maybe back when they had first been starting out as a group of teenagers confused with their own powers but rallied with the confidence of Bellwether. Back when they all thought Nate’s little missions were silly and dumb and no one believed that they might one day be the difference between life and death. No one had been angry with him before he had let Nate push him over the edge that one little time and he had let the Voice spit anything and everything it wanted.

 

He figured that they had never really forgiven him for that: for ruining the group before they had done anything worth remembering. Even Kelsie probably hated him for getting her dad killed. So really Ethan was not expecting much from a single phone from Sonia Sonic.

 

He knew what was going to happen, the same way he knew she had gotten their numbers from his phone without asking him. Not that he thought she had to ask him anymore. He crashed in her hotel room and used up all her shampoo. Fair was fair.

 

Still there was a huge difference between knowing what was going to happen and seeing Chizara “Crash” Okeke stomping into the diner like she had spent the flight to New Orleans plotting how to kill him best and not on keeping the plane in the air. Ethan stopped scribbling on the diner napkins enough to blink out his surprise at her, though it was missed in the shade of his sunglasses.

 

Not far behind her-- really not far because she was clinging to Crash’s arm-- was Kelsie “Mob” Laszlo. She had her headphones around her neck, but Ethan knew they were playing some feel good music even if he couldn’t hear it. She was still fighting off Swarm in her mind, but here with Chizara it was easier for her. She was smiling at Ethan, with a dip of confusion like she wasn’t sure why she was here after all.

 

“Chizara! Kelsie!” Sonia said happily as they approach the table they had been sitting at. Ethan had been sliding her notes between his frantic scribbling of all-knowingness just to show that he was listening when she was talking, but he knew she was still relieved to have someone who could devout their whole attention to her without feeling like they were going to explode.

 

Chizara ignored her in favor of slamming her hand down in the napkin in front of Ethan. “What the hell!” She swore at him, angry. “You just dropped off the grid? We had no word from you after all this, and then out of the blue we get a call from Sonia saying you’re in trouble?! We thought you were dead!”

 

Ethan met her eyes fighting off the ache in his frontal lobe at the information piled up. He flicked up his sunglasses so he could look them both in the eyes.

 

Kelsie winced, “You look terrible, Scam.”

 

He was well aware he looked terrible, thank you very much. His hair had been brushed as nicely as it could have been but it was still growing out of the buzzcut he had kept it in for so long. But beyond that there was only oh so much they could do for the deepening bags under his eyes, or the gaunt paleness of his skin, or the stiffening awkward of his neck because he had just spent three days without sleep hunched over a writing desk spilling out everything he suddenly knew about Brandy Marcus from Nebraska. Sonia hadn’t let him leave the room until he was dressed in clean clothes, so there was that. 

 

Chizara was having no pity for how he looked. “Answer me!”

 

His mouth opened purely out of habit, because he knew that Chizara had once killed a girl by stopping her heart and she had once nearly done the same to Kelsie and he knew he didn’t want to be next. But nothing came out. The stifling silence capped on his throat tucking the words back into his head. No Voice to save him from her anger, and not even his own squeaky socially awkward words would come out.

 

“Uh...Chizara…” Sonia cut in waving a hand in front of the younger girl. Her metal bracelets jangled at the motion. Ethan knew that it would have gotten anyone else’s attention in a heartbeat, but Chizara was fighting off a million pings and dings of a million phones in the city, along with the GPS of a million cars, the TVs, Laptops, and Radios. She was not happy to be here trying to save him again-- Ethan knew that she was remembering so long ago when his voice had dug him a hole in a bank robbery and she had come to save him from being arrested despite hating his guts.

 

She stared at him hard, “Tell your girlfriend to get out of my face before I turn her phone into a brick.”

 

Ethan sucked in a sharp breath. He knew she would do it; she wasn’t anymore a fan of Sonia than she was of him. And yet here she was. He gave Sonia an apologetic look, wishing more than ever that the universe didn’t hate him enough to give him all the clarity in the world and take away his voice for it. 

 

Sonia pursed her lips and pulled back. She tucked her phone out of the way. Ethan had written to her to turn it off please, but she had argued that she needed it on for the next big story and Ethan hadn’t won an argument with her in a long time.

 

“Ethan, what’s wrong?” Kelsie asked. She shifted from foot to foot, looking a mix of confused and worried in her neon pink crop top and silver pants. She looked ready to go clubbing, but with the four of them and the scattered faithful customers of the diner the curve must have hit her power enough to pick up on Ethan’s exhaustion and Sonia’s worry.

 

“He can’t talk,” Sonia finally managed for him. Her dark eyes watched them carefully. 

 

Chizara didn’t take her eyes off of him, “Since when?”

 

Sonia gave half a shrug, “Since Mardi Gras? He told me he got a face full of the Nexus machine that Piper had built. It blew up the barrier between him and the Voice.” She was far less confident as she went on.

 

“Did it now?” Chizara said skeptically, “You’re lying.” 

 

Which wasn’t possible, Ethan knew, because he knew everything. Like that they still had seven months and three weeks until Verity’s truth effects finally wore off the world. No one could tell any lies and Ethan had thought he was rather tired of lying about everything and everyone to get what he wanted.

 

The waitress made little noise behind them. She smiled at him and Sonia already having both their coffees ready because they hadn’t ordered anything new since they had started coming here a week ago. But she also had a sparkling water and a hot chocolate on her tray. 

 

Ethan had known what both the girls would want after a plane flight and a car ride and coming face to face with him yet again.

 

Kelsie slid into the booth staring at the hot chocolate with a suppressed look of confusion. Sonia thanked the waitress and mentioned how great her hair looked today. Ethan knew she would need to hear it because any bit of kindness was well received when she was still recovering from her god awful boyfriend leaving her without a warning.

 

“I’m not buying it,” Chizara said, but she was. Ethan could tell by the way she dipped her chin a bit when she sat down next to her girlfriend. How her eyes found the napkin increasingly interesting when she spotted her name on it. “Why are you writing about me?”

 

Ethan slid the cloth across the table, and took a sip of his coffee, trying to starve off burn of information in his brain. It was beginning to pulse again, with names and numbers and hope and dreams. Of the Future and the past and the present. He didn’t have much longer before it overwhelmed him again-- he didn’t want to be in the middle of a diner at lunch when it happened but his body felt heavier than lead at it was. 

 

Kelsie leaned to see everything she was reading, her eyes widening as she glanced between her drink and the napkin and the clock in the corner of the shop. “Oh my god.” Her voice was a tiny whisper, a bit of awe. 

 

Chizara waved the cloth in her hand eyes narrowed like this was a con he was trying to wrap her in, which he had never been able to do even when he could talk. They had called him scam, but he had never tried to take anything from them: he had only ever used it to get himself out of stupid situations. Which had only ever gotten them in worse ones.

 

“This. This is why--” She couldn’t seem to make words string into a full sentence. But then again he had written down everything that she had said-- was going to say-- and a helpful answer to some of them. He had ordered the drink she wanted, the time down to the second that they would show up in the diner after having gotten caught at a quick red light that their driver had nearly ran. His spider web writing was still hard to read, but he had even gotten the first words she had said to them right. 

 

That was enough to convince her they weren’t lying. It was an entirely different matter to get them to believe that he was going to die unless they helped.

 

“It’s not so weird,” Kelsie filled the silence, “Oliver unlocked a lot of things when his clarity touched everyone.” She smiled, and Ethan felt her calmness relax his tense shoulders in the feedback loop. Sonia found his hand under the table and she gave him a squeeze. Kelsie’s power would do nothing when everything in his head exploded in a few minutes. 

 

“This is different,” Sonia said. “This wasn’t meant to be unlocked.”

 

Not broken. Unlocked. Ethan thought he liked that word a lot better than broken. You could lock things that were unlocked. It was a lot harder to fix something that was broken as much as he was. Oliver was out there right now running another AA meeting with a smile that reassured the company they were safe in the confines of the group. He had a lot more members now than before, but his power never felt nearly as free as it had the time in the Nexus. Ethan gritted his teeth as the knowledge picked at his head. He reached for his pen again, before realizing his napkin was gone and he didn’t have anything to write on.

 

Chizara sniffed, looking him up and down, “A lot of things weren’t meant to be unlocked.” 

 

Ethan suddenly remembered two years ago how the Voice-- how he-- had called her a demon who loved crashing things. A week ago she had crashed a person, and no matter how evil Piper might have been, she wasn’t going to forgive herself easily. She also wouldn’t forgive him for being right.

 

“Chizara…” Sonia gave Ethan a worried look again. She ran a hand through her magenta hair as if she wasn’t sure what to say. The Voice would have known exactly how to get Chizara to help, but Ethan was one of a kind and also sleep deprived. He wasn’t helpful at all. He leaned his head against her. She couldn’t tell he but he was starting to sweat, keeping focus for as long as he could. 

 

It wasn’t smart to do this in a public area, but they also needed Chizara and Kelsie to know this wasn’t something they could fix on their own. They had tried. And Ethan was only getting worse.

 

His headaches had turned into migraines which turned into unending flashes of pain that couldn’t be stopped with over the counter advil. He had managed to hold off another day before he was swept up in it. It was spacey-- otherworldly-- and he had tried to explain to Sonia that it was terrifying to know everything: everyone’s fate. How the cleaning lady was going to get hit by drunk driver on a Tuesday six years from now, how the man in the room next to them was going to come home after his business trip to find his son spiraled in his absence and had taken far too many white pills, how the lady at the front desk was going to be fired for something unsavory that wasn’t her fault and she wouldn’t be able to get another job. 

 

He didn’t want to know everyone’s endings. Not when he couldn’t see his own. 

 

There were so many people in the world. So many people who were coming, who were leaving, who were here now. Ethan knew all of them, and he couldn’t control it. He didn’t think he could ever control it. Not before the words in his head ripped him apart and he dissolved violently into the very existence.

 

“It happens in bursts.” Sonia told them, she was beginning to sound disconnected. Ethan knew it wasn’t her, that it was his head. He also knew when he did collapse he would stumble into a nameless figure who no one had noticed approaching. 

 

“Sometimes he knows they’re coming, other times it happens without warning.” She tapped her fingers on the table, “Then...he calls them Explosions. It looks more like he’s having a seizure. He gets lost in the noise.” Her fist tighten, “I...I have trouble bringing him back.”

 

The girls shared a look, “That sounds like…” A frown.

 

Ethan held up his hand where he had scribbled the word they were both looking for,  _ T-H-I-B-A-U-L-T. _

 

“Him!” Chizara frowned, “Wait, who--”

Ethan pulled back from Sonia right before the the lights started flashing. Pinpricks. A loud laugh from a patron not far away who was wearing a wedding ring but she wasn’t with the man she had married because it was the first time she had seen her best friend in three months, three weeks, and six days. Ethan tried to block it out. He stood up.

 

Sonia was saying his name again. He knew by the way it fit on her lips, his name that she relentlessly called him back too. Who said names weren’t a powerful thing? He couldn’t hear her, despite it.

 

He could hear Wallice Green yell at his daughters that it was too early for them to screaming around the house in their tutus and dolls and cowgirl boots.

 

He blinked twice, and then the world exploded.

 

Ethan toppled to the side, falling completely on top of the man who no one had seen walk up, if only because he wasn’t actively trying to be remembered. He was dressed to the nines, wrapped up in a display that would have had any CEO rushing to hiring him. His eyes were clear and startled in their blue, because he hadn’t expected Ethan to collapse on him just as he had. Nor had he expected to show up, or Ethan to know he would show up, especially since Sonia had never called him and explained that they needed help.

 

He wasn’t here to help. But he was the first to respond when Ethan went rigid.

 

“Oh shi--” Thibault lowered Ethan to the ground, “Back up!” He waved off Sonia and the rest of the crowd that had suddenly appeared. “Give him space!” 

 

Or maybe that was Doctor Malic Wazner jumping up from his window seat (C45) on the airplane flight to Houston (Flight 22882) when the flight attendant fainted. Or maybe it was it was Grace Miller yelling at her son’s soccer game in four years that her son would definitely not hear over the other twenty yelling parents. Ethan’s eyes jerked in his head, his body yanked in separate directions like he was being torn in a million pieces. The agony in his head crashed down on him, swallowing him in the waves of timeless millions. His lungs heaved for something, anything to fill the void in his chest, something to hold back the overwhelming onslaught of information about the future. He was caught in the undercurrent, and he couldn’t break it. He didn’t know how.

 

He didn’t know why he would want to. Who was he? This hurt but it was everything he knew how to be because he was everything and anything that was going to exist--

 

“Ethan!”

 

No wait. He grasped for the thought, he clung to it. He was a person, a living breathing person. He had a name, people around him. He was scaring little Alice Thompson who was being shielded by her father as they watched from the corner booth, her knees pressed against the red vinyl, as she tried to see what was making all the screaming. 

 

“Ethan Thomas Cooper!”

 

He had dyed blonde hair and dark mistrustful eyes. He didn’t like John White, he didn’t like being on the run, he didn’t like knowing everything.

 

_ “Scam!” _

 

His eyes shot open again and he could see someone over him a face he didn’t know-- no that was Thibault. The french decedent who was sixth member of the Cambria Five that no one remembered. He craved attention but never managed to hold on to it like the rest of them. He saw the silvers of attention the way that Nate did and he cut them when he didn’t need to be recognized, but he couldn’t strengthen them the way Nate did. 

 

Ethan inhaled all the oxygen in the room. He choked on a cough, when he forced it back out. Because that's how people breathed: inhale and exhale and inhale. Sonia was by his side in a daze, she found his hand in a heartbeat and squeezed it.

 

“Ethan?” Her voice was weak, but it was clear. She was saying his name and it fit in her lips perfectly.

 

He nodded, his arms were shaking but he tried to squeeze her hand back. 

 

He hadn’t been able to tell her what would happen when he let the explosion happen. He didn’t know his own future. He didn’t know if he would have lost himself, or if it would be enough. He didn’t even know if it had been worth it. 

 

“He’s alright!” A voice to his side yelled. Thibault waved the waitress away, “It’s okay!”

 

They were going to call the ambulance anyway. Ethan knew he didn’t want to be here when it showed up. He let Sonia pull him up, and he swayed for a second as the floor dipped in waves that only he could sense. 

 

Harley Davidson who was in town for a wedding dropped his fork as he finally recognized them, “Hey aren’t those the kids from the Cambria Five?” 

 

Sonia gritted her teeth and took most of Ethan’s weight to guide him to the glass doors. Thibault was on his other side holding back the questions he really wanted to ask, most of which were whys and whats and hows. 

 

Chizara took a steady breath, “Well, this is really something bad, isn’t it, Scam?” She dropped a twenty on the table and allowed Kelsie to link their fingers and drag them both after the three of them.

 

(Ethan definitely hadn’t “forgotten” his wallet because he knew she would pay for everything after whatever happened happened. There were absolutely no perks in this terrible power.)

 

The sun felt a lot like a bullet burning right through his head. He had lost his glasses when he fell over, which was okay, because Ethan was only in the blinding daylight for a few feet before Sonia had unlocked their rented van. Her own car wouldn’t have been big enough for the five of them. She shoved him gently in the back, and took up the keys. Thibault claimed the passenger side and the girls found themselves in the back with Ethan.

 

Sonia pulled them into traffic exactly a minute before the ambulance would arrive. They passed it going the opposite direction. 

 

“How long has this been happening?” Thibault asked. Sonia, Chizara, and Kelsie flinched at the same time.

 

“Who are you?” Sonia demanded.

 

“Thibault,” He answered smoothly, “Keep your eyes on the road. How long has this been happening?”

 

“Since Mardi Gras,” Kelsie tugged at the foam lining of her headphones, her anxiety rushed over them for a second before she reigned it in and replaced it with determination. They would figure out how to cure whatever was happening to him.

 

(Ethan didn’t know if that was true. He knew that it was far more likely he would die before they got close.)

 

Kelsie took up summarizing what they knew, which wasn’t a lot. Between the five of them Ethan could feel the undertone she was trying to hold back: the worry, the anxiety. Her fingers were clasped around his upper arm tightly and Ethan understood that she felt if she loosened even a tiny bit he might slip back into that ghastly seizure state. Crash was silent, in her I’ll-pretend-I’m-calm-and-everything-will-die-down way. 

 

It didn’t take long, but when Kelsie was finished Thibault took only a moment to think. “He hasn’t slept since Mardi Gras?”

 

Sonia gritted her teeth, “No, it started as minor headaches, then migraines, then...these!” She shot a look at him in the rearview mirror. “We figured out that if he keeps writing everything down that he can hold it off for hours, but he can’t sleep. It’s been three days...”

 

She frowned as if she had forgotten who had asked the question. 

 

Thibault twisted in his seat to look at him, “The human body can manage eleven days without sleep before it starts hallucinating.”

 

“We won’t let it get there.” Kelsie promised.

 

Ethan nodded absently at them both, feeling sick on the inside as he grabbed at the notebook and the pen they had left in the car. Three of the pages were already filled with notes about a baseball game scores and football tickets and the swim times for the girls high school swim meet next weekend in Virginia. 

 

They didn’t owe him anything. And yet they were still here.

 

“We are going to need Bellwether.” Chizara finally spoke up, “Sonic, did you get a hold of him?”

 

“I got sent to voicemail.”

 

Ethan scribbled a sentence about how much he loved Sonia in the margins, even though they both already knew about that.

 

Thibault sighed and rubbed his forehead, before he pulled out a burner, “He’ll pick up for m--Who TAUGHT YOU HOW TO DRIVE?!”

 

“Who the hell are you?!”

 

The car jerked and Ethan’s pen scraped the page. He ignored it and kept writing. He knew that Sonia would forget Thibault one more time before they finally got to the hotel they were staying at. Thibault would get Nate to pick up on the second ring because Nate never got calls from Thibault, and he was always more willing to pick up a call from a former teammate than from a random number he suspected was a reporter.

 

Nate would bring Flicker with him and they would arrive in New Orleans first class at seven fifty one tonight, despite Agent Phan’s disapproval.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lets talk this out

 

“It’s a simple answer,” Nate Saldana smiled his signature Glorious Leader smile. “Ethan just needs to turn his power outside in.”

 

The six of them all turned to where Ethan was scribbling on another notebook. He met Nate’s look for exactly two seconds, enough for his cramping hand to release its tension before he was back to flinging down words.

 

Nate was standing in the hall of the hotel room, dressed like he was running for president. His hair was neatly growing out of the buzzcut that prison had mandated from him, but he was all confidence now. It was hard to believe that a week ago he had been wrapped around Piper’s finger willing to do anything to help her destroy the world. The color had returned to him, his smile contagious in his certainty. He was manipulating the strings of attention in the room again. 

 

Sitting on the bed nearby, Flicker hummed audibly. She was dressed in a bright yellow sundress, with daisies on dancing on her hem, and soft sandals. She was more thoughtful, than he was, and not nearly as confident that the answer was just that easy.

 

“Is that a thing we can all just do now?” Crash asked blandly, with a wave of her hand. The lights flickered throughout the room, but only as a display that she could plunge them into darkness if she wanted to. 

 

“Well, it does seem like Ethan was the only one who couldn’t do it.” Kelsie wrinkled her nose, leaning back against the legs of the bed Chizara was sitting on. Anymore to the left and her cheek would bump into her girlfriend’s leg. “I mean… Flicker can draw attention to herself, you can fix things instead of crash them, Nate can shove focus off himself… even I can fall to swarm if I’m not careful.”

 

“I can’t.” A voice spoke up in the corner. Thibault was sitting crossed legged on the bed and Ethan caught sight of Sonia’s hand flinching out of the corner of his eye.

 

They all seemed to remember at the same time that Thibault was a real person. Even Flicker tilted her head to the side before smiling widely, because she remembered his name without him having to say anything.

 

“I can’t draw attention to myself the way that Nate does.” Thibault continued, “And trust me I’ve tried.” His tone darkened with a bit of bitterness.

 

Ethan ripped part of the page and handed it to Sonia.

 

“I’m not repeating this out loud.” She told him flatly, and Ethan wiped a smile off his face before the rest of them caught him. She folded the paper neatly half and then in half again, her pink nails making the folds crisp.

 

“What was that?” Chizara, ever suspicious asked.

 

“Nothing.”

 

“He had some interesting words of choice about your idea, Nate,” Flicker announced. “And now he’s telling me to get out of his head.” She smiled in a way that suggested she would do no such thing. Ethan wasn’t surprised. 

 

He knew that Nate and Flicker had used this same trick a thousand times over back when they had been a team and trying to solve the problems of drug money, mobsters, and the police rather than how to keep Ethan from exploding again. He was pretty sure his handwriting was beginning to slip; it had taken Sonia longer than usual to read it.

 

Nate bounced on his feet, “Then this could be a learning experience for you both then.” He clapped his hands. “Come on!”

 

Ethan ripped another piece of paper off and handed it to Sonia. She pursed her lips,“This isn’t any better!”

 

“I’d have to agree,” Thibault startled them again. He was a shadow on the edge of all their awarenesses. Ethan knew he was there, that he was constantly battling back the urge to sink into the Nowhere and didn’t need to worry about manipulating people on top of that. He was after all a big follower of the Way which Ethan also knew he had explained to him multiple times before. The Way told him he was nothing, that he should not trick others into doing things by power or not.

 

Thibault frowned at Ethan seemingly uncomfortable, as if he knew that Ethan knew about the pull of Nowhere. Sonia had explained again that Ethan was omniscient and that he probably knew them all better than they knew themselves. But there was the lingering doubt, the uncertainty from some of the party.

 

Ethan scribbled another note but before he could rip it, Flicker made a small noise. “Of course, that makes sense. He says that he already tried turning his power inside out.” 

 

(Ethan thought that seemed rather condescending of her. Who gave her the right to sound surprised that Ethan had ideas? What part of “they had been trying to fix this by themselves” did she not understand?) 

 

“How did you try, Ethan?” He added like an afterthought, “if you don’t mind me asking.”

 

Sonia made an impatient sound, “All the ways.” Her arms were crossed and she was still a little angry that the Glorious Leader would answer a phone call from a guy no one remembered rather than from her. 

 

“I don’t think this is going to get us anywhere.” Thibault said, “Besides it doesn’t sound like Ethan’s power is just inside out. It sounds like the dam that kept all the information of the entire universe in his head just got blown up.”

 

“How do we fix something like that?” Kelsie picked at the carpet. “It’s not like we can just build a new...Ethan.”

 

Chizara was looking at him hard, hard enough to draw Ethan’s eyes off the string of symbols a Jimmy Forent and his brother were using as a secret code do get into their treehouse secret base. Ethan twisted the pen in his hand, tilting his head to the side in a clear display of  _ “What? Is there something on my face?” _

 

“What, you don’t know how to help yourself, Scam?” Her smile was less than friendly. A bit too sharp for Ethan’s tastes. “So much for being Omniscient.” 

 

“He can’t see anything that has to do with his own future.” Sonia supplied almost as miserably as the first time he had written it down to her.

 

The room was silent as they chewed on that. The air conditioner ticked annoyingly. Flicker licked her lips nervously looking like she wanted to say something but didn’t have the courage to say it. 

 

Nate, however, had no such qualms in his thoughts. “There could be a reason for that.”

 

Ethan pressed the pen too hard against the paper. The ink bled through three pages. He didn’t want Kelsie to speak up. He’d give anything for her just to stay quiet and the conversation to skip past it. But Nate had been too bold, too loud, and his choice of words to belligerent for them to not raise a response.

 

“What type of reason could that be?” Kelsie asked. 

 

Ethan knew what he was going to say: he knew it was what Flicker had been thinking and refused to say and what Thibault had figured out when before either of them had arrived. He knew what reason it could be because it was the first reason he had come up with. 

 

He hadn’t shared it with Sonia. 

 

It had nothing to do with the fact he was afraid she would agree.

 

Nate kept speaking even over Ethan’s internal screaming. “Maybe you can’t see your future, because you don’t have one.”

 

They reacted how Ethan expected them to: Sonia with a loud and angry gasp, because  _ how dare Nathaniel Saldana say something like that to one of his friends. _ Kelsie was rigid, her gaze a million miles in the past where her father was still alive. Flicker pressed her lips together sliding herself into a standing position on the springy carpeted floor.

 

There was a difference between knowing what the Glorious Leader-- what Nate-- was going to say, and actually hearing the words drop from his mouth. Ethan dropped the pen. He pressed his hands to his forehead like he could stop the sudden onslaught of thoughts pouring: they weren’t his and he knew because they were all organized and weighty. They danced between what Ethan’s death might mean, how the Cambria Five would react, how he could twist their thoughts towards the impending ending so that they might be able to unify one more time. They were completely Nate Saldana’s thoughts and Ethan didn’t want any of them down on paper.

 

He wanted to tell Nate to stop thinking, to shut up. He didn’t want to hear the clear clinical thinking that was being done seven feet away.

 

\--Then the silence was broken by the sound of a slap. Something sharp and dangerous and nearly lethal. Nate staggered back.

 

“I can’t  _ believe  _ you!” Chizara’s tone was fiery. Her fury was a tangible thing even from the six feet away were she stood just outside Nate’s personal space. Her dark hair gathered behind her loose, the lights flickered violently and the automatic safe in the corner of the room popped open. The microwave clock flushed off. Ethan didn’t think she looked like a demon, but if she had been Nate would have been scrambling for a cross. 

 

“I can not believe you would say that!” She shouted. “He may be a rat-weasel, but he is one of us, Nate!” 

 

Kelsie’s feedback loop sprung into action-- quiet and vicious anger that stabbed like being stung by a million bees at once. “He tried to sacrifice himself for you! Don’t you remember when he tried to convince Flicker and I to turn him into the hospital after he hit his head in the car crash? He was willing to be arrested in the hospital to get a memo to Phan that Piper was going to unleash World War Three!”

 

“That really was uncalled for, Nate.” Thibault spoke up.

 

Flicker pressed down the folds in her dress, “It’s not like you to try and give up before we’ve even started.”

 

Nate didn’t sound very much like his usual Bellwether self when he spoke. “I was just trying to cover all the bases.”

 

“Uncover it.” Chizara snapped, “Ethan’s not dying on us.” For someone who had just been eying him like she was trying to figure out if he deserved the quiet painlessness of her crashing his heart or if it was better just to claw out his throat with her nails, she suddenly seemed adamant that they were going to get through this. 

 

She turned to face him, “I think you’re an awful person most of the time, Scam.” Her brutal honesty tore into him in a familiar pattern. Ethan knew this, before he knew everything. It was something she had glared into him for years. “But sometimes you don’t suck. As much as I don’t want to admit it, without you we would still be stuck in that stupid Faraday Cage and Piper would be crowning herself queen of the world.”

 

She took a deep breath, “So, we are going to figure this out.” She was awfully determined about this. Ethan could see it in the way she was holding herself upright: both her hands clenched in fists, reigning in the flickering of the lights and the hundreds of pinpricks dancing through the phones in the city. 

 

Sonia squeezed his shoulder, reassuring, and filled with relief: as if she was convinced that they were going to leave him when he needed them the most.  _ Look, Ethan, _ she was thinking,  _ they care about you. _ He pressed back the tears that were threatening to fall, and he was more than grateful to have her in his life.

 

“So, where do we start?” Flicker asked, pleasantly. As if they were planning for a picnic tomorrow, or a day trip, or something equally unimportant. She smiled at Ethan, her shades hiding blank stare to the point where she seemed like a normal teeanger. 

 

He picked up the pen again.

 

Thibault made a slight humming noise from where he was sitting. He was staring at Ethan with a pensive frown. Then he swiped his hand throw the air, a chopping motion the others had seen him use a million times before (and always forgot about afterwards). “This is...strange.” 

 

He didn’t say that like it was a bad thing. He actually might have been a little bit pleased.

 

“What’s up, Anon?” Nate asked as if he had any right to speak after suggesting they might not be able to help Ethan after all. He pressed his hand to the pulsing side of his face, the red outline of Crash’s hand was already beginning to appear.

 

“I...I can’t cut his attention from me.” Thibault made the motion again, but Ethan was aware of him just as much as before. “I was trying to see if I could ease the information flow into his head by removing myself from the input, but it seems that I can no longer remove myself from his awareness.”

 

“There are thousands of things flowing into his head every second,” Sonia pointed out, “Not to be condescending, but you really think you’re single existence was going to be even noticeable for him?” She didn’t say it very nicely, but Thibault didn’t take any great offense. Ethan knew he had been thinking the same thing anyway.

 

“I just wanted to see.” He said, which isn’t an excuse, isn’t an explanation. Ethan loves and hates that there was almost no reason for it to fill the room with empty words. It was like they needed it to fill the silence left by the absence of their ideas on how to help him. 

 

Ethan just barely understood; they hated the silence just as much as he craved for the voices to stop.

 

Kelsie tapped her lip, “Well what if there are more Zeroes out there?” 

 

Ethan scribbled out the note and handed it to Sonia without much prelude. Stats on the Zeroes was one of his more knowledgeable attributes. 

 

“He says there are...” She squinted at the paper “wow that’s a lot of people with powers.”

 

Kelsie clung to that like a lifeline. Her mood lifted the air, suddenly dazzling them with the overflow of hope. “One of them is bound to be another Scam! They can help!”

 

But Ethan was shaking his head already, pointing at the paper in Sonia’s hand that she hadn’t finished reading.

 

“Ethan’s one of a kind,” She said, “There is no one else like him.”

 

An ugly truth, but Ethan had known it since before Mardi Gras, his suspicions ever growing with every copy cat Zero they had come across. He had no one to turn to.

 

“Wait, what if we don’t need another Scam,” Chizara said.

 

“What do you mean?” Flicker tilted her head as if she could actually see the other girl with her own eyes. The voices whispered in Ethan’s head about how much practice she had done using her sister’s eyes.

 

Nate shifted catching on to her line of thought, “You mean like someone who would know how to figure out what to do? Like a fixer? A power dampener?”

 

Sonia gasped quietly. “What about a Fortune Teller?”

 

“Someone who can tell us what we are going to do?” Flicker said, “That could work.”

 

The six of them looked to Ethan and this time he was grinning. He spun the pen in his clammy hands shifting through the information about Zeroes, and he found a name he remembered from before, because they had met before once and she had told him he wouldn’t like what would happened.

 

She had also left town right after Sonia and him had left her, just picked up her business and disappeared in an american made van that held all her magical mystical gimmicks.

 

Ethan gave Sonia the information, the roads she was taking and then grabbed his jacket from the chair.

 

“It looks like a road trip,” Sonia Sonic told the rest of them, “A really long one.” Her smile stretched across the room, so grateful, so meaningful. Ethan couldn’t believe that he had somehow won her over, that she really did love him as much as the knowledge in his head said she did.

 

“I’ve got nothing scheduled,” Thibault said.

 

Sonia raised an eyebrow at him, “But you--”

 

“You’re going to need all the help you can get,” Flicker smiled.

 

Chizara and Kelsie found each other’s hands. And although the former didn’t look outwardly excited, Kelsie was brimming at the idea, “It sounds like fun.”

 

Nate laughed. Ethan felt his clinical thoughts burn out, the objective point of view he held himself at faded. He was Nate again, not the Glorious Leader. But they were both confident in their abilities.

 

“What are we waiting for?” Sonia asked. “We have nine days to catch up with this fortune teller.”

 

Nate flipped out a phone, dialing what Ethan knew was a rental place, “I’ll drive.”


End file.
